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Morrison's Hypertime

If you visit Warren Ellis' message boards at his official website, you can read a discussion about Ellis' conversation with Morrison over Hypertime. Ellis was so impressed by Morrison's definition of the concept that he said, "I have seen the glory." While I wouldn't even go that far, here's what Ellis says about the concept, taken from his message board...

"It's one of those things that's difficult to capture on paper if you're not the originator, I suspect. Firstly, it wasn't set up to explain continuity glitches. That's not its point, as described to me. It's...

It's Grant trying to describe a new physics for fictional reality. And it's time considered as a volume. a three-dimensional artifact.

My recall is flawed. We were drinking heavily. There could be crucial mistakes in the following:

Take a glass sphere studded all over with holes, and then drive a long stick right through the middle of it, passing exactly through the center of the volume. That's the base DC timeline. Jab another stick through right next to it, but at a different angle, so that they're touching at one point. That's an Elseworlds story. Another stick, this one rippled, placed close in so that it touches the first stick at two or three points. That's the base Marvel timeline. Perhaps others follow the line of the DC stick for a while before diverging, a slow diagonal collision along it before peeling off. This sphere contains the timeline of all comic-book realities, and they theoretically all have access to each other. In high time, at the top of the sphere, is OUR reality, and we can look down on the totality of Hypertime, the entire volume.

Hypertime is a tool for the consideration of fictional reality.

I think that's what he said, anyway. "

Now, I think we can dismiss the possibility that the above is just an alcohol-rendered hallucination from Ellis. But what's really interesting is that Morrison's Hypertime doesn't really differ from Waid's Hypertime at all; it's just that Morrison tends to use bigger words and get a lot more metaphysical than Waid. Also, in Kingdom, Waid had to distill the vastness of the concept into a storyline, which is a lot easier said than done.